As Zyme strengthened its leadership in providing a robust, agile, and resilient CDM solution, it recognized the need for a disaster recovery and business continuity plan for real-time, non-stop access to critical channel data and reporting. To meet growing customer expectation for business continuity, while economically scaling for growth, Zyme partnered with Sungard Availability Services® (Sungard AS) to transform its IT infrastructure from a legacy hosting model to an agile, secure and highly credible private cloud that integrates recovery into production.

“Now, our environment is more agile, robust, flexible,and high performing.” ASHISH SHETE Vice President of Products and Engineering Zyme

The Challenge

Facing the future and making a plan

Consider Zyme’s IT journey. The company provides a 100% cloud solution with a multi-tenant architecture. Platform upgrades are immediately applicable to all customers. And the highly confidential data flowing through the system is fully secure. Data flows from partners, after which it is validated and enriched. Then, it is sent to customers, often loaded directly into their customer relationship management systems to make the experience seamless.

Initially, Zyme relied on physical hardware since stand-alone nodes and upfront infrastructure costs were high relative to revenue. With low redundancy and onsite tape backups, its recovery point objective (RPO) was 48 hours and its recovery time objective (RTO) was measured in weeks. Each user had to log in multiple times. Hardware deployment cycles were long: typically eight weeks.

“Our service level agreements at that point would allow occasional downtime. But this was not going to sustain us going forward,” says Ashish Shete, vice president of products and engineering at Zyme. The company decided to step back and create an infrastructure vision and a multi-year plan that would align with its own business objectives and its customers’ growing expectations.

Partnering with Sungard AS, “we started working jointly to create a roadmap for moving our infrastructure to the next phase,” adds Shete. “We initially focused on availability, scalability and agility. We had to virtualize our infrastructure. It was no longer sufficient to load software directly on the physical boxes because, if a box had a problem, the application could be down for quite some time.”

The Solution

Virtualization and private cloud

By 2013, Zyme embraced virtualization. Working with Sungard AS and VMWare, the firm introduced N+1 redundancy and high availability with a clustered environment. With offsite tape backups, its RPO dropped to 12 hours and RTO to 5 days. Hardware deployment times were reduced to 4 weeks. It was an advance, but still required a considerable upfront IT investment.

Two years later, Zyme was ready to enter the next phase: Sungard AS private cloud. By introducing a private cloud with Cisco, NetApp, and VMware, the firm now had an agile, robust, flexible, and high-performing infrastructure. With backups encrypted to disk, it now had an RPO of just 4 hours and an RTO of 12 hours. Hardware deployment times fell to 10 days. There’s a single-sign on process. And it has reduced total cost of ownership by eliminating upfront investments.

As Zyme’s private cloud provider, Sungard AS eliminated hardware liability while accelerating its ability to spin up new virtual machines as necessary. “Now, our environment is more agile, robust, flexible, and high performing,” says Shete.

The Benefits

Pure cloud and powerful payoffs

Results so far are impressive. The data flowing through Zyme’s platform has tripled since it began its journey. Processing times have been reduced by 80%. It’s a transformation toward robust, flexible, high-performing capabilities with industry-leading recovery services provided along the way.

In the next phase of its journey, Zyme will roll out a “pure cloud platform” — making the firm increasingly agile and flexible. The Sungard AS infrastructure can be extended to include additional third-party services as Zyme’s business evolves and could include AWS, Azure and other cloud services for an extensible, heterogeneous platform. It’s a stage of infrastructure development that will run indefinitely into the future.

Capable of meeting increasing needs for real-time processing, the performance of its infrastructure will continue to rise. Not only will Zyme have self-serve hardware and multiple hot sites for enhanced recovery; it will engage in on-the-fly integration with customer platforms and other SaaS/cloud providers.

The move is expected to further enhance ROI and TCO. “As we move along on the journey, we want to take advantage of all the technological advances that are happening in the industry,” adds Shete. “We want to be one step shy of the cutting edge — to reduce our risk. But we do want to take advantage of all the innovation.”

In its partnership with Sungard AS, Zyme has been able to focus on growing its business while providing a marketchanging CDM solution and delivering continually rising levels of performance. Together, the two companies have built a value proposition based on agility, credibility and security. That’s enabled Zyme to remain the leader in its field, and paved the way for a bright future in cloud-centered channel data management.